A wide variety of services are offered over the Internet. Web Services is a list of standards (often identified by the prefix “WS” such as WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, and so forth) whereby applications may be generated to offer a wide-variety of services over the Internet. However, other services are offered that do not use the Web Services standards. While services are valuable in providing users with requested services a vast majority of the time, services can experience occasional service outages for any one of a variety of reasons. Once a service outage is discovered, an administrator may diagnose the cause of the outage, and fix it.
Sometimes, when a service is having an outage, the user may simply see a simple message indicating that the server or service is not responding, but receive little information regarding when the service is anticipated to be back up, or regarding the nature of scope of the outage. Sometimes, specific applications will have ways of alerting administrators or users when the application is having a problem. However, such alerting mechanisms are not common across all applications, and have lesser or no capability for alerting administrators or users when an outage is caused by a system failure outside of the application perhaps within the framework that supports the application.